* ColdFusion MX 7 supports mobile devices
Macromedia recently announced the release of its latest version of ColdFusion, named ColdFusion MX 7, which provides support for mobile devices as well as improved rich forms support, reporting and printing.
ColdFusion is, should you be one of the two Web applications people who haven’t run across it, a tag-based server-side scripting language similar in feel to HTML and XML that can be extended and customized with custom tags, reusable components, and user-defined functions. It can also have structured exception handling and integration with Java, C, C++, COM, CORBA, and EJB.
The ColdFusion MX 7 release extends these features as well as adding several new facilities that are very impressive. Specifically, the ColdFusion MX 7 release adds:
* Structured business reports that essentially compete directly with products such as Crystal Reports.
* The ability to dynamically transform Web content to PDF or FlashPaper 2 format to provide print-quality output that includes headers and footers, multiple page sizes, and orientations as well as saving output to disk or sending as e-mail.
* Flash-based forms that support multi-step data collection and can be “skinned.”
* An SMS gateway to support mobile applications.
* A new CFCHART engine for producing charts and graphs with over 200 different modifiable attributes to control animation, colors, labels, etc.
* A new text search implementation based on the latest version of the Verity full-text search engine that supports hierarchical category searching, spelling correction suggestions, and highlighted search results.
The new Enterprise Manager application allows creation and management of multiple application instances and their deployment across Windows, Unix and Linux platforms.
ColdFusion MX7 can run as either a standalone application server or on top of J2EE application servers, including Macromedia JRun, IBM WebSphere, and BEA WebLogic.
ColdFusion MX 7 Standard Edition includes two CPUs for $1,299 while the Enterprise Edition, also for two CPUs, costs $5,999.
